David Koepp is arguably the most successful screenwriter never to become a household name, responsible for the scripts for Jurassic Park, Spider-Man and Mission: Impossible. He’s also been in something of a career renaissance recently as the writer of choice for Steven Soderbergh’s hyper-productive genre-hopping return from retirement. So it’s entirely unsurprising that Koepp’s first novel, a well regarded bio-zombie thriller from 2019, would be turned in to a film. What is surprising is that it’s this one.

Cold Storage opens in remote WA in 2007, where a tank holding a contagious fungus crash landed when the Skylab space station returned to Earth’s atmosphere in 1979. The tank has been accidentally breached, leading to the dispatch of a biochemist (Sosie Bacon) and two pentagon bioterror specialists (Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville). The locals appear to have all met a grisly fate, and despite elaborate safety measures, Bacon soon does too. Out of an abundance of caution, Neeson and Manville respond by blowing up the entire area and whisking the remaining fungus off to an underground cold storage facility in Kansas. Problem solved.

Time passes and in the present day a self-storage business has been plonked on top of the former military site, where “Teacake” (Joe Keery) and Naomi (Georgina Campbell) are rostered to work a night shift together. As their evening progresses, signs start to appear that maybe the fungus isn’t as well stored as you’d hope, wreaking havoc at the facility and dragging Neeson grumpily out of retirement.

The film has two major flaws. The first is tonal. Every actor seems like they’ve been given different direction as to what film they’re in. Keery and Campbell are genuinely quite charming, their rapport given oxygen to grow as they explore the underground labyrinth of the facility together. Neeson is committing enjoyably hard to the 90s disaster movie trope of the ageing expert to whom the numbskulls in charge won’t listen. But the shifts between the two are jarring and make it very difficult to get a handle on what frequency you’re supposed to be tuning in to.

The second is the fungus itself, and it’s fatal. The fungus and the effects of its contagion are so poorly animated and aesthetically uninteresting that when the infections start in earnest, it’s difficult to do anything other than shrug.

The whole film is a bit of a head scratcher. Given Koepp’s clout, and the fairly stacked cast, why is it directed by English television journeyman Jonny Campbell, whose only theatrical credit was in 2006? Why is it a US-French co-production filmed in Italy and Morocco? Why is Vanessa Redgrave in it? We’ll probably never know.

If you’ve got a high tolerance for low quality CGI and are an especially big fan of the zombie comedy sub genre, this may work for you, but otherwise it’s hard to recommend.

 

Cold Storage is currently playing in Australian cinemas.